Apple has bought a company that points to the future of its camera phone technology

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Apple has made a small but significant secret acquisition that may well point to camera functionality that we will see in iPhone XI and beyond.

The Danish company is called Spektral and they have built some fantastic imaging technology that allows users to 'isolate' of objects in photographs and in real time, removing the background.

The application was originally meant to be a Photoshop plug-in but now Apple has gotten its hands on it, it's very likely that we will see this technology baked into future devices.

CloudCutout

The app has gone through a number of guises, it was also called (for obvious reasons) CloudCutout.

On the company's site, it explains its technology as follows: “Our pioneering and unique technology is based on state-of-the-art machine learning and computer vision techniques.

"Combining deep neural networks and spectral graph theory with the computing power of modern GPUs, our engine can process images and video from the camera in real-time (60 FPS) directly on the device.”

This type of imaging power will definitely be common place in phones in the coming years.

The rise of processing power means that real-time editing in video will become the norm as much as the iPhone XS' ability to change the aperture of a shot once it has been taken.